Authors: A.J. Tata
Sudden Threat (2 page)
Matt had pointed at the map with his team and said, “If he doesn’t go the back way out of Tora Bora into Parachnir, he’s going there.” His finger had smacked the map north and west of Peshawar. “We’ve got enough dudes up in the mountains; this is where we’re going.”
Then as they were about to move, an Eastern Alliance checkpoint reported the pearl of intelligence to General Ali. An ambulance had appeared from nowhere in the snowstorm and was passing through Torkum Gate, heading east.
“That’s him. Get Pred feed over it now,” Matt had instructed. The Predator was unarmed and could only monitor. Matt’s hunch, headquarters determined, was not the main effort.
Tora Bora was the focus and therefore received the balance of the armed assets.
Four men and two mules had walked all night from a drop-off point near the border. They shivered and struggled to keep their bottled water and Camelbak hydration systems from freezing. After a quick recon, Matt had selected this rocky crevice with superb fields of fire into the village.
Matt plugged a cable from his sniper scope into a USB port in his small handheld satellite com-munications device. He was transmitting his sight picture back to Langley, but he also knew that the national command authority in the White House situation room and the national military command center in the Pentagon routinely tapped into the CIA video; all in the name of post-9-11 intelligence sharing.
Matt could not give a rat’s ass about who was watching the video feed.
They want proof? They can watch the bullet pass through his brain
.
They were perched high above the village nearly 500 meters away. The driving snow provided ample cover, especially with their white gilley suits that lay atop them. Two of his men were faced outward, securing their position from any passerby. Tony Macrini, known as X-Ray, lay next to him peering through a larger scope, confirming what Matt was seeing as well as providing redundant digital confirmation of the kill.
“Pred lost them, but they’re heading this way,” Matt said, confidently.
“Roger,” Macrini said, then spit some tobacco into the bone-white snow. The brown juice disappeared instantly beneath a fresh layer.
Bones and McKinney tapped Matt every fifteen minutes. One tap meant all ok; two taps meant there was a problem. Better with minimal talking.
Matt’s heart quickened just a bit. Though he was experienced, to know that he potentially had the shot on Al Qaeda senior leadership elevated his nervous system slightly. That was good, he thought. He wasn’t nervous or anxious, but there was something nagging at him.
He had been told to call in approval for any sniper shot on AQ senior leadership.
It’s okay to drop a bomb on a cave and kill the dude
, Matt thought,
but I can’t pull this trigger without approval?
“Movement,” Macrini said.
Matt shifted his scope marginally and picked up two men with AK-47s slung across their backs standing outside in the snowstorm.
“That’s it,” Matt said. Pulling into the view of his scope was a makeshift ambulance with a large, red cross on either side. It slowly wound through a defile and pulled to a stop in front of the larger adobe structure in the nine-building village.
Men clambered out of the ambulance and opened the back door, extracting a stretcher. After the AK-47-clad stretcher bearers pulled the litter from the back, a short man wearing wire-rim spectacles stepped carefully from the compartment into the snow.
Matt watched as the wire-rimmed, spectacled man rapidly ushered the precious cargo into the large building. Momentarily losing sight of everyone, Matt was pleased when they placed the stretcher on a table juxtaposed to an open window.
“I’ve got the shot.”
“You’ve got the shot,” Macrini affirmed.
Matt deliberated in his mind.
Make the call, not make the call?
“You’ve got the shot,” Macrini said again, emphatically, as if to say,
screw the call.
Before Matt could ruminate any further, his earpiece crackled with the sound of a distant incoming radio call.
“Garrett, standby.”
“Don’t answer it,” Macrini cautioned. “I don’t like it.”
“They can see my feed, they know we can talk.”
“Garrett, standby, acknowledge immediately.” Matt didn’t recognize the voice through the wind and static, though he assumed it was some bureaucrat seventeen times removed from his low level status as an operator. He registered that the voice could be coming from any of the outstations: Langley, the White House, the Pentagon, and God knows whoever else might be watching. The 8,000-mile screwdriver was going cordless.
“I’m telling you, man,” Macrini warned. “You
know anything good to ever come from head-quarters?”
Matt looked at his friend, a former Marine Force Recon scout. Macrini’s beard, like his own, was thick. He wore a pakol and tan and green blankets beneath the white sheets they used to conceal their position.
He turned back to his sight picture and lined up the black dot of the cross hairs on the middle of the patient’s torso. The medical team had stripped the man, a very tall man, down to his long johns. The white shirt was stained red on the left side. Shrapnel, maybe a bullet, Matt figured. The scope traced the body and then the black dot landed on the bearded face, actually just to the side of the elongated nose and just beneath the dark, brooding eyebrows. The eyes, though, seemed compassionate, or perhaps he had the faraway look of a wounded deer.
Matt nodded to his battle buddy, exhaled steadily and placed an exposed trigger finger on the trigger mechanism. He found that spot where he would have no pull on the weapon, just straight back, not moving the weapon, sending the bullet directly where the cross hairs were resting. He closed his eyes briefly, retreating into that inner sanctuary that allowed him complete focus. Opening his eyes, all he saw was the black dot and the man’s face looming large in his sight picture, the way that a slow-spinning curve ball might look to Tony Gwynn, the greatest batsman of all time.
“Homerun,” Matt whispered.
“Homerun,” Macrini confirmed.
“Do not fire! Do not fire! Kill chain denied!”
“What the hell?” Macrini said, rolling away from the scope and yanking out his earpiece.
Matt didn’t move. He was in his zone. Every-thing was in slow motion; his breathing, his trigger finger beginning the squeeze, the movement of the patient’s head turning toward him, exposing the worn prayer callous on his forehead.
“Take the shot!” Macrini growled.
“Do not fire! Kill chain denied!”
“Take the shot!”
With the good angel on one shoulder, Macrini, and the bad angel on the other, the anonymous voice, Matt closed his eyes.
I’ve got the shot.
“This is a direct order. Entry into Pakistan was not authorized. Kill chain denied. Violation will be prosecuted.”
I’ve got the shot. I’m close
.
“Take the shot!” Macrini demanded.
Matt exhaled again, keeping his sight picture, and squeezed the trigger at the same time a JDAM missile exploded perilously close to his position.
“Holy shit!” Macrini shouted, covering his face. Bones and McKinney turned toward Matt, who was still in his zone.
The bomb’s detonation created a bright orange fireball that mushroomed into the sky nearly 100 meters from his position.
“Closer to us than the shack,” Matt said to his three teammates.
He looked at Macrini, who stared back at Matt and shook his head.
“We were punked.”
“Roger that,” Matt said.
“Kill chain denied, Garrett. Return to Jalalabad for new orders.”
Phase I:
Chasing Ghosts
Chapter 1
Thursday, April 25, 2002, 1900 Hours (Local)
Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines
The one time my country asks for a head on a platter
, Matt Garrett said to himself as he recalled the nightmarish scene in Pakistan. He let out a heavy sigh, watching the sun dip behind Mount Apo, just to the west of Davao City, Republic of the Philippines, on the island of Mindanao. From the freezing snow to the humid backwaters. From the epicenter to the periphery.
I had the damn shot!
Disappointed in himself, he shook the memory from his head and crushed a smoldering butt under the sole of his dingy work boot.
Keeping his gaze fixed on the gray evening, he noticed a few destitute, but nonetheless workman-like, Filipinos scurry around the concrete fishing piers that abutted Davao Gulf, a horseshoe expanse of water adjacent to the Celebes Sea.
Pulling the ratty Dodgers baseball cap down over his forehead, Matt shook off a bit of his clinging anger and discreetly strode next to a shack, watching the activities—nothing out of the ordinary. He had been cycling between Zhoushan Naval Base, China, and Davao City for over two months. Tonight, he had been given instructions in the form of a text message from his handler to meet a dockworker who would provide him information.
A few short months after being mysteriously yanked from Pakistan while in hot pursuit of Al Qaeda senior leadership, Matt was now trying to locate a large number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) called Predators. They were just being put to good use in the War on Terror, and it appeared that someone had traded this technology to the Chinese for financial motivations. Either that, or the Los Alamos debacle had contributed to the satellite imagery that indicated the Predators were being built and tested near Zhoushan. He had developed a lead in China when he suddenly received a message from his handler that there was a significant find in Davao City; and so here he was.
Every time I’m close, I’m moved
, Matt thought to himself.
Matt was large, a college shortstop, and looked comfortable in his cargo pants and khaki shirt. He tugged at the Dodgers baseball hat again and hid his eyes behind Oakley sunglasses.
“Muggy,” the dockworker said to him in Tagalog.
“Always in the evening,” Matt said in Mandarin.
A hazy mist rolled off the bay, distorting the presence of hundreds of fishing vessels. A gull stood guard atop a pylon and flapped its wings once, as if to shiver, though the temperature was in the nineties.
“Got any cigarettes?” the man asked, this time in Mandarin also. That was the key, he had been told.
He turned and looked at the slight Filipino. Matt, standing over six feet, towered above the diminutive man, who was shorter than five and a half feet. The contact had black hair and brown eyes, the norm in that part of the country.
“Sure. Here.” This time in English. Matt grabbed his rumpled pack of Camels and held it out to the source, who took two, glancing at him for approval. Matt nodded.
“Running out of time,” Matt said. He watched the man put a cigarette between yellow teeth and strike a match. Once he had lit the cigarette, the man shook the match and tossed it on the pier. He looked in both directions, then nodded at a ship across the harbor.
“See that tanker?”
Matt looked past the rows of red and gray fishing ships in the direction the man had nodded. He saw several tuna rigs, then could make out a large black-and-red merchant vessel. It looked more like a container ship or an automobile carrier. He guessed the contact had mistaken it for an oil tanker.
“What about it?”
“Japanese. Leaves tonight. Didn’t off-load anything, but Abu Sayyaf put something on it.”
Matt continued staring at the ship and read the name on the side:
Shimpu
. That name registered with him, but at the moment he couldn’t remember why.
“What was it?” Matt asked, still staring at the ship.
With his peripheral vision, Matt saw the guard remove the cigarette from his mouth and begin to speak. What followed happened quickly: The orange tip of the cigarette fell from the man’s hand and dropped at Matt’s shoes as his contact’s body shuddered. Instinctively, Matt pulled his Glock 26 from beneath his untucked shirt and jumped onto a floating dock running perpendicular to the pier on which they had been standing.
As he leapt, he saw that the contact was prone on the pier and bleeding from a head wound. He also felt the hot wash of a bullet pass uncomfortably close as he ducked behind a junked generator, which he presumed was used as an auxiliary power unit for some of the ships. The generator pinged twice from gunshots. And Matt eyed a large Bangka boat with a roof, a ferry of some type, going somewhere.
The helmsman was removing a weathered bowline from a rusty cleat about thirty meters away. There were a few passengers that he could see; mostly fishermen, probably making their way home to Babak on the eastern side of the gulf. He waited until the captain gave the boat a slight shove. As he watched the boat separate from the pier, he sprinted as if he were stealing third base against a catcher with a rifle arm, then did his best long-jump imitation, feet cycling through the air.
He landed with a thud on the roof of the boat, which promptly gave way and dumped him on the floor, which held.
The helmsman had put the engine into forward, and the ferry was moving slowly away from the pier.
No more shots followed him, but he thought that the ship captain might decide to take over where his other attackers had left off. The wizened man was screaming and baring his teeth, throwing his arms up in the air. Matt understood most of what he was saying and stood, brushed himself off, and pulled five hundred dollars from his wallet.
“Sorry about the roof. Buy a new boat,” he said in Tagalog.
“My boat. Had for twenty-five years. New roof.”
Clearly the man was bargaining with him, so Matt pulled two hundred dollars more from his pocket and handed it to the man but didn’t release it. The helmsman tugged on the money with a weathered hand.